My school recently organised its very own unconference NISTech 2011. This provided staff with an opportunity to consider IT integration in an environment which advocated considered discussion and real consideration of the needs of all the stakeholders.  Sessions themes were identified in advance by the staff under the headings of discussion or skills.  As it was mandatory professional development (I don’t begrudge this is anyway but is does make the fact I diligently attended every session sound a little more normal).  In total there were 7 sessions attended or helped facilitate.  More detailed content from a number of these will very shortly be appearing my blog.  However, I do want to quickly recap on the sessions I did go to and make some comments.

 

Session 1

Student Organisation – Using Outlook, OneNote and other digital resources to help students stay organized with their laptop and school materials

I was actually facilitating this session with the help of David Hilbourne (Head of Math and OneNote wizard).  My task was to help inform teachers that outlook has tremendous potential for helping student organise themselves by allocating assignments through the task manager (this becomes one of the themes of my day).  It also has a range of tools to help us teachers organise ourselves.  The power of using OneNote as an ever evolving workbook for student designed was clearly presented.  I can really see the benefits of this idea especially in mathematics and potentially for me in the future with my higher Physics class (but I have some other plans on that which will come up later).

Session 2

To blog or not to blog – When is using a blog an effective tool when teaching and learning? Discuss situations and motivations for creating, maintaining, and using a blog.

Teresa Tung – a Humanities teacher – led the discussion on blogging.  As a prolific blogger herself  was refreshingly admitted that she was struggling with practically implementing this into her own classroom.  This led to an excellent discussion with respect that there is a time and place for blogging and how our school can create a place (or places if we use also create an individual blog to help student organise their own personal portfolios).  One of the key points was we needed to find the right motivation (s) for insightful commentary and comments – a homework task for a whole class to comment on something did not fit into this criteria.

Session 3

Student Organisation – What are the best tools to use to help students organize their work?

I facilitated this with Jason Reilly and will discuss in much more detail later.

Session 4

Departmental Meeting – How can we more effectively use IT in Science?

Outcome 1 – recognition that we need to find and develop student skills in a more effective graphing programme than excel.

Outcome 2 – Recognition that excel can be very useful but the skills for students are not being developed elsewhere and we need to step up to the plate.

Session 5

Video Tips – After you have planned the video, tips on how to create a better video from camera angles, lighting, downloading, adding sound/music, and edit the material efficiently and effectively.

So this is the session I selected just because this seemed the most interesting of the bunch and I when I do try and use edited video effectively in my classroom I have some great starting points.

Session 6

Passwords – How to manage? What do you do? – An exploration into Lastpass

So I am now using Lastpass to help me organise all the passwords that exist in my world.  I have even tried to get my Dad to use it, which indicates that it is a success.

Session 7

Syncback – Auto backup/update notes/files to portal/media/dropbox

A really useful tool for synchronized backing up which I am already using for personal content up to dropbox.  What I really need to do is think how teachers running parallel courses can use it effectively to share resources.